Tag Archives: aquifer

Tom Fanning, our genial CEO host,
said some things I’ve never heard him say before like
Southern Company is
“pivoting towards wind”
and SO’s board soon has to decide whether to go forward with Plant Vogtle
“or not” probably by August.
Fanning gets the
first and
last word in this blog post,
plus a complete transcript of what
I asked and
Tom Fanning’s response,
along with summaries of the other questions and answers.

Please hear me!
I think renewables are exceedingly important in the future.
— Tom Fanning, CEO, Southern Company

Spectra’s Andrea Grover is “disappointed” in Sabal Trail being on the
Georgia Water Coalition Dirty Dozen;
does she also find it “hard to believe” like Sabal Trail’s well-documented
eminent domain threats?

Time may have passed, but opinions haven’t changed much here in
Valdosta, where people..who are against the pipeline say there are
countless reasons why it doesn’t belong in their backyards.

“There’s a moral obligation to leave the world as beautiful and
majestic as we found it, and the pipeline; it does not do that”,
says Gretchen Quarterman, President of the Lowndes County Democratic
Party.

A question asked about big oil and Mobile is just as relevant
to every local and state government along the proposed Sabal Trail
fracked methane pipeline,
and Transco and Florida Southeast Connection, too.
A couple of local elected officials and several candidates did make
public statements Saturday (stay tuned), so maybe we’re starting to
get some answers to this question in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Some other locations have already been getting answers.

Now, it should go without saying that the purpose of councils,
commissions and public office in general is to represent the varied
interests of the citizens, and hopefully through consensus- seeking
achieve some semblance of collective wisdom; and then, if we’re
really lucky to apply said wisdom in charting our course toward a
Mobile our great grandchildren will be proud to inherit.

Yet, when it came to finding a voice to protect our drinking water
from Big Oil, we heard nothing substantive from our local leaders,
even though we marched on their doorsteps in boots that are still
wet with BP oil.

Maybe we should stop inviting toxic industries to Lowndes County.
We’ve been doing that with coal ash, PCBs, superfund wastewater,
used diapers in recycling, and suing local businesses while not terminating
an exclusive franchise with a company that is involved in all of that.
Not to mention Sterling Chemical.

Here in Lowndes County we have
TVA coal ash and Florida coal ash
in our landfill,
and the landfill operator spreads the coal ash on roads on the site,
which is just uphill from the Withlacoochee River.
GA EPD
fined that landfill operator $27,500 in January 2013
for accepting PCBs into that same Pecan Row Landfill.
The same landfill that accepted
196,500 gallons of wastewater from the
Seven Out Superfund site in Waycross, GA.

The costs of achieving a more ambitious EU climate target are
estimated to be moderate. Upscaling greenhouse-gas emissions
reduction from the current 20 percent by 2020 to 40 percent by 2030
would be likely to cost less than an additional 0.7 percent of
economic activity.

And that apparently doesn’t count the additional economic activity
that would be produced by all those wind and solar deployments,
not to mention related activities like electric cars.
This is actually a pessimistic study, because it doesn’t account
for such likely positive corollaries.

Twenty-seven tanks of wastewater were stored at the facility.
Four portable tanks were storing the excess capacity of wastewater next door
on property owned by CSX Transportation.
These portable 10,000-gallon tanks were not labeled to indicate their contents;

According to a BCX representative, one of the portable 10,000-gallon tanks
had a gasket failure on the forward manhole which caused the release of an
unknown substance onto the ground at the site owned by CSX
Transportation;

Dead vegetation was observed in a 15 feet by 30 feet area downgradient of the
tank that caused the release;

A yellowish-green substance was observed on the ground between the portable
tank that had the release and another portable tank adjacent to it. There was
also dead vegetation observed between these two tanks; and

And GA EPD tested the soil and found something the document doesn’t
specify, but whatever it was was enough that: Continue reading →

Around the
Seven Out and CSX contamination areas in Waycross more than 100 people
have gotten sick or died,
most since 2000, with groundwater contamination
known since 1985, according to Joan Martin McNeal,
So the CSX problem long predates
the Seven Out problem.
Here’s her map of the CSX property (in yellow) and contamination, sickness, and death:

According to this February 2000
tricholoroethylene isopleth map,
there was already extensive contamination in the CSX railyard by 2000,
extending across an internal drainage ditch that goes into the
Waycross Canal that become Tebeau Creek, running through downtown
Waycross into the Satilla River.